Battle of France Map - Part 2 - WIP

great work really!

thank you and i can't wait flying on that one! Smile

did you have all town done ? (Lille, Dunkerque...) Confusedhock:
Reply

Battle of France - Part 1 will have airfields and towns done for the R Meuse breakthrough area, roughly Cambrai - Luxembourg and Laon to Nivelles (235x118km). There is some very limited scenery in the other parts including Dunkerque, Calais, Boulogne and Dover harbours. Only the airfields in the Part 1 area are complete and will work properly for AI. Some other airfields are included but need much more work.

For those in Holland and Belgium I apologise. I know Holland/Belgium should really be Part 1 but I'm afraid this will not come until Part 2. Part 3 will be the Channel Ports and England.

*** The Beta release of Part 1 is imminent ***

A lot of work has already been done for Part 2, including full object population trials, and airfields info compilation.

The full release will have roughly 1.2 to 1.5 million objects, to provide a reasonable but workable representation of NW Europe. Missing from the Beta release will be railway stations and industrial areas, although the rail network is included. There will be over 500 bridges, so plenty of target opportunity. The map is at 1:1 scale (400x270Km).

Future plans include extending the map north to include the airfields around The Hague and the Arnhem bridgehead (1944), and east to include the Moselle and Rhine. If I can keep the object count to less than 1.5 million this should be possible.

Hope you will like it.
Reply

Thanks for all your hard work. Big Grin
Reply

Anyone plan on building single missions or campaigns on this map? I'd love to fly a French Hawk-75 and other French planes but I'm afraid I know very little about the air war in the Battle of France to make my own missions.
I've been searching for books on this subject but have found very little Cry
Reply

What do you mean with "perfect mode compatibility" problems and what is the resolotion? Imho "perfect mode" is just hardware shaders = 1?
Reply

zipzapp -- Lowfighter has been testing in "perfect" mode. The problem related to random trees appearing on roads railways and rivers. These were not visible in "excellent" mode. Solution was to provide a separate texture under roads and rivers which had the random tree option turned off.

CzechTexan -- You could try the Peter Cornwell book
http://www.afterthebattle.com/osCommerc ... 28b8505fff

I haven't read it yet. I'm waiting for a paperback edition. I've just finished reading Valiant Wings, by Norman Franks. Excellent account of the British Fairey Battle and Blenheim bomber squadrons.
Of course there are numerous general books on Battle of France. One of the best I have read is To Lose a Battle, Alistair Horne, which does a reasonable job of describing events from all sides.
Reply

This shows the "in-game" map, with the area of Part 1 marked.

[Image: Untitled-36.jpg]
Reply

Thanks, i just started painting fields and woods (but there are still other things to do) and didn't notice that yet except with field textures with random trees (Romania & Slovakia). There i take just fields without trees. But how can i be shure to have the "perfect setting"? - My actors is 21 MB now, that's about 2,5 millions objects, no problems, i think i will finish with 25 or 30 MB;-)
Reply

[quote="asheshouse"]zipzapp -- Lowfighter has been testing in "perfect" mode. The problem related to random trees appearing on roads railways and rivers. These were not visible in "excellent" mode. Solution was to provide a separate texture under roads and rivers which had the random tree option turned off.[quote]

This seems to happen when the map is loaded in the unlocked Full Mission Builder but not in the regular FMB. I've had trees appear in the middle of runways but in the normal version they disappear.

Not sure if this is the same thing as you describe.

Ian
Reply

No, it's different Jeremiah, the trees appear in normal FMB or playing the game. The random trees generated with crop fields textures like those of Slovakia have predefined positions and they'll not be shy to appear on roads or even on rivers.
Unlike the truelly random trees...
If you want to see it, take the load.ini of a standard map (moscow summer for example) and replace say existing lowland0 entry with
lowland0=land/summer/rom_fields_LowLand2.tga (that's a Bessarabia crop field texture)
and follow the roads which are driving on lowland0 regions to see the trees.
Reply

Just a little update on Part 2 progress. I'll keep this thread for Part 2 stuff now.

Part 2 area has been sub-divided into 16 regions which vary from 50x50km to 100x50km in size to allow the scenery models to be opened up in FMB Map Editor. The actors.static files need to be roughly 500KB max size to work in FMB Map Editor. I plan to start with the Liege-Maastricht region. This includes the Eban Emael fort and the Albert Canal bridges. Not sure how I'm going to model the fort using standard objects :?
Reply

First draft of Eban-Emael (a representation rather than an accurate model).
The Albert Canal bridges are in the background.
Now where can I get a Luftwaffe skin for the G11 glider?
Here -- http://mission4today.com/index.php?name ... 2&get=2436

[Image: Untitled-38.jpg]
Reply

Now moving into Holland.

The airfields I have information on in the area south of Rotterdam are:

Rotterdam-Waalhaven
Vlissingen
Gilze-Rijen
Haamstede
Eindhoven-Welschap

The three airfields around the Hague, Valkenburg, Ypenburg] and Ockenburg, all fall outside of the map area -- at the moment.
Reply

asheshouse said "The three airfields around the Hague, Valkenburg, Ypenburg] and Ockenburg, all fall outside of the map area -- at the moment."
Does that mean you plan to widen your map even more in time to come? Confusedhock:
Reply

No promises. -- When I started this back in December we didn't really know what we were doing and there was a lot of experimentation. The size of the map was set by taking the original files from the Singapore map and converting them -- because we knew this would work.

The south boundary of the map was set in "Stonne", a critical village feature in the battles of the Sedan bridgehead. This meant that the north boundary did not extend to the Hague, something which I now regret.

Extending the map to include the Hague would also bring in Arnhem, which is also just missed.

It would be nice to do -- but the priority now is Part 2.
Reply


Forum Jump:


Users browsing this thread: 2 Guest(s)